In a landmark decision Tuesday, the European Court of Justice ruled that European Union regulators can override the Safe Harbor agreement, a 15-year-old accord that has — until now — allowed Apple, Google, Facebook, and about 4,500 other U.S. companies to transfer data from European users to the U.S.
The court believes that the current agreement violates European citizens’ right to privacy by exposing their private data to the U.S. government through the American companies’ cooperation with U.S. intelligence agencies.
The big companies who rely on this agreement, like Apple, will most likely rush to try and appeal the ruling, or at least quickly come to another agreement that will allow them to do business in Europe, which of course includes personal data from users.
Daniel Castro, vice president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation believes this ruling will cause a huge disruption to the companies currently operating under the Safe Harbor agreement.
“Aside from taking an ax to the undersea fiber-optic cables connecting Europe to the United States, it is hard to imagine a more disruptive action to trans-Atlantic digital commerce,” Castro said in a statement.
U.S. tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google (which makes 90 percent of its revenue from advertising) face a loss of that very same revenue if the court’s decision stands unchanged.
It’s a fact of modern life that after Edward Snowden exposed U.S. surveillance on internet and phone communications in 2013 most of the rest of the world is concerned that their own private data will be targeted by U.S. spymasters if technology continues to flow through the U.S.
The answer is to come up with a better agreement than the one hammered out in 2000.
The court’s decision won’t shut down data transfers overnight, but does give regulators in the EU the ability to investigate and shut them down if they feel like there are not enough protections in place.
Source: Wall Street Journal
Via: Investor’s Business Daily
Rob LeFebvre is an Anchorage, Alaska-based writer and editor who has contributed to various tech, gaming and iOS sites, including 148Apps, Creative Screenwriting, Shelf-Awareness, VentureBeat, and Paste Magazine. Feel free to find Rob on Twitter @roblef, and send him a cookie once in a while; he’ll really appreciate it.
2 responses to “European court rules Apple and other tech companies are violating privacy”
It is actually rather simple, the US companies and government have to respect the privacy of those in Europe to the same extent European companies have to. See, the Europeans respect and demand privacy and have laws to back that up. We (in the US) are the chumps for not requiring privacy.
Only partially true…
The problem lies in the fact, that most of the US tech companies does NOT save the data on THEIR OWN servers, but they hire other private companies (more than 5000 if I am correct).
The case was first filled by Austrian citizen who discovered, that Facebook stores data on servers in Ireland.
Ireland court reject the case at the time, now the General Court of EU ruled as mentioned.
It is a fact that security standards in US are below the standards of EU, so this should be expected sooner or later, but it is not disruptive at all…